As any reader of this blog knows, an interest in social illusions is central to the ways I interpret the goings on as the end of industrial civilization approaches. Several important analyses of the global ‘poly-crises’ that confront us have been presented in the climate and economic literatures as well as in government reports—e.g., those of the IPCC. The IPCC reports have been heavily biased in favor of business-as-usual “solutions.”
Conventional analyses of climate change, in their projections of global warming have assumed, without evidence, the near future deployment of unproven prospective complex industrial technologies such as carbon capture and storage. They imagine that such technologies will significantly retard the growth of atmospheric carbon and thereby slow or reverse the heating of the planet. Conventional climate economics ignores both current growing inequalities and how they will be exacerbated by climate chaos. Climate justice takes a back seat to continued economic growth.
Nevertheless, analysts such as French economist Thomas Piketty are turning to the idea of transitioning to a global economy that reduces inequality and environmental damage is an essential element in any resolution of the degradation of the Earth System.
As models of transitioning to a new economy based on equity, environmental protection, and slow or no growth of GDP, become more sophisticated and deal with many variables in building models of a transition to a slow, green, or equitable future, one key element remains missing. The missing link in most climate, energy, or economic research on transitioning to an ecologically viable future is how to get there from here.
Inequality is Central to Industrial Civilization, and its Downfall
Thomas Piketty wrote the book on the role of capital in sustaining poverty and inequality in the twenty-first century. Most economists would agree that it was the most important economic analysis in decades, whether they agree with his findings or not. The book got many awards as a breakthrough work. Recently, Piketty participated with dozens of other experts and model builders in producing a new work that addresses the need to transition from the global extractive economy of capital accumulation to more equitable societies. Their economic modeling included many concepts new to conventional economics, such as ‘sufficiency,’ ‘degrowth,’ and ‘green growth.’ That work is titled, The Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. It caused quite a stir.
Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, caused quite a stir, because it demonstrated how capital accumulation in the hands of the wealthy grows faster than the economic growth of the whole economy. The result, of course, is that wealth tends to concentrate at the top of the economic hierarchy, unless subject to economic policies that regulate the distribution of income and wealth. That is what causes increasingly intolerable inequality within industrial societies, with all the pathos and loss of wellbeing for increasing numbers of people, regardless of their personal character.
With this analysis accepted, ‘blaming the victim’ will no longer work. Poverty is caused primarily by the way the capitalist system is rigged, not by the pathology of the poor, which is caused by poverty itself. That is why any attempt to create a viable economy grounded in the goal of serving the interests of all the people, must find a way to overcome inequality. Furthermore, the same forces that drive inequality also force climate chaos and ecological destruction because of capital’s necessity for ever expanding extraction of material, energy, and labor to produce a profit.
Meanwhile, Ecological Decay and Climate Chaos Threaten a Catastrophic Collapse
Poverty is not the only negative outcome of a system that excessively concentrates income and wealth among the financial elites. Governments become subservient to wealth because of the insertion of money into politics. Not only are economic elites allowed to engage in unjustified inequitable practices exploiting workers for increased wealth, but their political privileges allow them to extract material and energy—as well as labor, which they would soon replace with automation and AI—in ways that damage the very same natural systems that sustain life. As the saying goes, “This is unsustainable.”
Greed focuses on the present and near future. Environmental damage be damned. The ideology of ‘economic progress’ justifies growing political domination as well as inordinate financial privilege. The result, as more and more people are coming to realize, is the destabilization of both human and ecological systems. As extreme weather events grow more intense, political upheavals occur in parallel. The economic system is threatening both the Earth System and the people, as well as its diversity of living beings. The only option is to form an ecological civilization, such as Jeremy Lent proposes in his new book, Ecocivilization.
Economic Transition or Societal Transformation
Timothee Parrique wrote a ‘friendly critique’ of the World Inequality Lab’s 136-page report, “A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries,” coordinated by a team of seven, including Piketty and others. Parrique raised several issues regarding the modeling and assumptions and definitions upon which the work was based. He shed some light on the complexity of it all. However, if I understand it correctly, two things are not considered nearly enough by either the report or Parrique’s critique—although doing so is fraught with even more complexity and a healthy dose of unpredictability.
First, the fact that certain aspects of the human predicament of overshoot, in the broadest sense, appear inevitable, yet hard to face. The trajectory of human extraction, use, and waste of energy is itself reaching its tipping point in numerous ways. The limits of growth are being reached and the means for reducing or even reversing and transforming growth are subject to political factors the control of which is a very open question.
Second, energy use has reached a turning point, a point of no return—regardless of how much more fossil fuels are extracted and burned—after which a severe transformation of human social organization appears to be inevitable. But what are we to do about that?
However, the particular forms and outcomes of that transformation are unknowable without also knowing how political and economic forces will respond to the inevitability of change. Whatever models and definitions of degrowth and potential future steady states may be applied, two key expectations seem necessary to consider.
Population decline from climate/ecological chaos will be accompanied by mass migration (forced by large crop failures and supply chain disruptions) and resource wars to the extent that global coordination of societal transformations and wealth re-distribution amid restructuring economic flows to build ecological civilization, does not occur.
Until experts and their models and definitions such as those discussed in the report and its critique incorporate these larger expected processes of radical change, and the potential for human interventions, their models and definitions will have no meaning.
The historical record of catastrophic societal change, collapse, and sometimes recovery, suggests two potential outcomes: 1) societal as well as ecological collapse; and 2) a New Great Transformation led by the mobilization of the people in opposition to “business as usual,” and the formation of ecological communities is search of survival strategies. The intransigence of governments, corporations, and global financial elites, including the increasingly dominant “tech-bro” multi-billionaires and the technocracy over which they preside, must be overcome. The only source for initiating a New Great Transformation that is grounded in the necessity of building a global ecological civilization based on human wellbeing instead of capital accumulation by the ultra-wealthy, is collective social mobilization to redirect institutional policies and practices to that end.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 